ANATOMY OF TORTURE — Historian Christopher Dietrich on the 100-year-long history of American torture; Jeffrey St. Clair on the implications of giving impunity to the CIA’s torturers; Chris Floyd on how the US has exported torture to its client states around the world. David Macaray on the Paradoxes of Police Unions; Louis Proyect on Slave Rebellions in the Open Seas; Paul Krassner on the Perils of Political Cartooning; Martha Rosenberg on the dangers of Livestock Shot-up with Antibiotics; and Lee Ballinger on Elvis, Race and the Poor South. Plus: Mike Whitney on Greece and the Eurozone and JoAnn Wypijewski on Media Lies that Killed.

Thanksgiving Day to Mourn

by A D HEMMING

On Thanksgiving Day this year we will need to mourn not celebrate this insane day of genocide the Pilgrims against the Pequot Indians in 1637 carried out the most gruesome manner, thus making a day similar to Holocaust Day to say never again. The slaughter of these indigenous people by sanctioned by these English religious fanatics known as the Pilgrims was a day of shame, and the Pilgrims have much to be ashamed of with their pathological behavior befitting the lowest of the low among living things and almost as Christian as the Roman troops who crucified the Prince of Peace on the cross.

William Bradford, the white bitch governor of the then Bay colony as it was then known was the one who first proclaimed the celebration of this disgraceful and brutal genocide carried by sword, fire, and rapiers against innocent Pequot men, women and children in a truly “Christian” manner just like the Christian Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition as befits “Western Civilization.”

In an article from the US indigenous perspective entitled “Cooking the History Books: the Thanksgiving Massacre” the truth comes out and it isn’t pretty in the least but is a reminder of what this day really is about. It’s something all here in the USA should think about when watching football games, swapping stories, and so heavily indulging themselves in a huge feast, and that is this is a day to mourn not celebrate that tragic day of genocide.

Cooking it definitely is. In this case all the talk about a bountiful harvest and great feast between Indians and Pilgrims is especially a good “cooked up” job. Even though some Indians may have had a meal with the Pilgrims in 1621, this wasn’t at all what the Pilgrims would celebrate in the least. Nor does the official account about the Indians even say which Indians. Instead it’s back to the old stereotype of all Indians being the same, a racist mentality going right along with the official account of Thanksgiving.

The whole purpose of this meal was for the Pilgrims to finagle the title to the Indians’ land, and that’s just what these “righteous Christian” fanatics did to make sure, as some of them weren’t entirely sure they had “clear title” to the land without a signed document. The Indians had been on this land for thousands of years before the Pilgrims ever established their Plymouth colony.

It’s also interesting to look at what’s known about the Pilgrims from the time they were back in England and were the religious bigots with regard to whites in England that they would later be toward Indians on this side of the Atlantic. These Pilgrims would get funds to move to Holland, a country where the government was very tolerant of the Pilgrims, but the Pilgrims deemed this same government to be too tolerant of others with different mores and more likely to be less inhibited in their sexuality and some other matters, thus not at all to the Pilgrims’ “taste.”

Thus the Pilgrims then decided they must move to parts where they wouldn’t be exposed to such “pagan” behavior. They then got funds to go to the New World to set up a colony. As a result when they landed at Plymouth in 1620 after their trip over on the Mayflower, they set up said colony. But they weren’t doing well at all, and it was Indians who came to their rescue as their colony “built on Plymouth Rock” was about to founder. Later some would say as the USA was built on this foundation which was a lot of hot air and could be demonstrated to be such by the Deist religion of virtually all the founder fathers of the US “republic.” With the term here used loosely, as it was no such thing based on objective basis as only property owning white men would have any say in government except in New Hampshire.

But this history has been so covered up so well by those of the European Caucasian persuasion to the point of absurdity, but it makes sense that we find that those who carried it out were religious fanatics and loonies of the English Calvinist Protestant variety who would carry out such massacres in Ireland under the “leadership” of Oliver Cromwell, one of their slime ball fellow “Christians” as whole towns not agreeing to convert to the Calvinist brand of Protestantism ended up put to the sword regardless of gender or age in the latter part of that same century.

However, thanks to anthropology, another discipline at least that of William Newell, one time chair of the anthropology department at the prestigious University of Connecticut and a Penobscot Indian the real history has emerged and like “truth crushed to earth” has risen to knock down the BS formerly passed off as the gospel truth by “true defenders” of US and Western “civilization” in the halls of academia.

The terrible “offense” of the Pequot was the “cold blooded” killing of an English trader the Pequot suspect of kidnapping their children. The Pilgrims, being the “righteous” mad dogs they were were thoroughly damn outraged that “heathen” people of color in this case the indigenous people of this land whom we robbed of their land would have the “nerve” to put the European Caucasian to death. “Damn” this was “absolutely serious,” and so was the gnashing of teeth in Pilgrim precincts as one might suspect and most especially in those of “devout” clerical types such as Cotton Mather who in a true “outrage” on this “awful” matter and preaching likewise against the “heathen” Pequot. Talk was that the Indians especially the “heathen” Pequot were absolute Devil worshippers. The Pilgrims were ready to get into their “righteous wrath” like mad dogs.

How dare the “heathen” kill a European white man and maybe even a “Christian”?

Sure the other Indians had offered a feast to these Europeans, taught them how to plow, and otherwise how to take care of their worthless and religious loony selves, but this was “just too serious.”

Hell it was all settled these Pilgrims would just have to hunt down these “terrible devil worshippers” and give them some “hellfire and brimstone.”

But Pilgrims were “brave,” but not so brave as to take on Pequot warriors in open combat far better to attack defenseless old men, women, and children and put the “fear of God” in them. Hell fighting other able bodied and armed warriors might actually cost quite a few Pilgrims their life or blood. Thus the decision came easily to the top mad dogs among the Pilgrims by the name of John Mason and John Underhill. These “fine troops” were made up killers for hire or mercenaries like the later Hessians except with less morality than that of a caged animal, caged by his own dogma. This “expeditionary force” the Pilgrims hired out was made up of some Indians either already enslaved by these English Pilgrims or simply betraying their fellow Indians.

When these “fine specimens of defenders” of the “Christian and European” way of life came upon the 700 “heathen” Pequot men, women, and children’ the Pequot were celebrating the Green Corn Dance and thus not noticing these kill crazy mercenaries hired out by the Pilgrim mad dogs to wreak “revenge” on these “heathen” Pequot. After surrounding the village the mercenaries burned all and killed all the Pequot they could get to by sword, fire,or the rapiers of the Pequot. This was “true Christian” brutality which Governor Bradford would “celebrate” the next day.

Being such a “man of God” Bradford would thank God for this genocide against the Pequot and spell it out as the “subduing of the Pequot.”

Putting the right question Laura Elliff, the vice president of the Native American Student Association asked “Is all that turkey and stuffing a celebration of genocide?”